Protecting your privacy while listing home

Selling your home may be difficult, considering that you must open your doors to potential buyers. Your privacy and security may become an issue when showing your home to buyers, so it is important to consider all your options before you welcome someone into your home.

For many individuals, it is very important for them to protect their privacy, while others are simply concerned that buyers will make assumptions about them and judge them instead of simply judging their home. However, the importance of protecting your privacy is all the same and that goes for anything personal from financial information, such as check books to banks statements and personal letters.

Private documents: Is it snooping to open a drawer? Not if the drawer is part of a built-in such as a kitchen cabinet or a dining room china cabinet. Buyers can innocently tug on a drawer to inspect its construction or depth and find important documents that you might not intend for anyone to see. If you have a lock on your file cabinet or desk drawer, now is the time to use it.

Don't leave mail where anybody can find it. Lots of sellers leave piles of opened mail neatly stacked on the kitchen counter. Buyers could find out how much you owe department stores or other credit cards. They can tell if you're late on your mortgage payments or other bills.

Remove diplomas and wedding photos from walls: Remove personal effects from your walls. From diplomas and religious artifacts to wedding certificates and personal photos, don't provide buyers with any personal information about yourself or your family. De-personalizing is also an important move to make when staging your home for sale anyway, so you can actually accomplish two things by removing the personal effects from your home.

Wedding photos might give away the seller's religion, as do certain religious artifacts left in the home. Buyers can be prejudiced. Don't give buyers a way to form any opinion about you at all. Don't let buyers form ideas about you from the type of music you like or the literature you read.

Don't leave your computer up and running during showings. Gaining personal information from your computer takes only moments for a professional hacker or thief, so be proactive and shut your computer down before your guests arrive.

Before you put your home in the market, prep it, empty out drawers, stage closets and pack up anything remotely personal including medications. Disassociate yourself with your home - remind yourself that it is a house - a product to be sold on an open market that is bound to see plenty of new faces throughout the term of the selling process.

Anna Vozza is president of the Windsor-Essex County Real Estate Board. Phone 519-966-6432.

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